I had met Nancy on the Fourth of July, just about when my sister was getting herself pregnant, I suppose. The occasion was the opening of the first Dodge car agency in Eau Fraiche, on Buffalo Street. Anthony Clark, Nancy’s father, had moved his family to town in the middle of June, and then had spent the next two weeks getting his showrooms ready for a gala opening. And a gala it was! We had all heard about the new Dodge car, of course, and had studied pictures of it in the newspapers and magazines, but this was our first opportunity to actually see it. Mr. Clark had hung bunting over the entire front of the building, and three young girls wearing red, white, and blue in keeping with the spirit of Independence Day, were serving doughnuts and coffee at one side of the showroom. Mr. Clark himself was giving what amounted to an automotive lecture near the right front fender of one of the two new cars on display, a bright green beauty. The girls serving refreshments ranged in age from thirteen to seventeen; the one who caught my eye was the little blond in the middle, about my age, with eyes the color of the touring car Mr. Clark was describing.
“She’s a four-cylinder automobile,” Mr. Clark was saying, “with an L-head engine and a bore stroke of three and seven-eighths by four and a half inches...”
The blond girl with the green eyes looked at me.
“... thirty-five horsepower,” Mr. Clark was saying.
I looked back at her, and she blushed and dropped a doughnut.
“The piston displacement is two-twelve point three cubic inches, and she weighs twenty-two hundred and fifty pounds. The wheelbase is a hundred and ten inches...”
I walked over to where the three girls were serving. The stand had been decorated with red, white, and blue bunting, the same as the outside of the showroom. The girls were all wearing ruffled white hats on their heads, like Revolutionary ladies, white blouses with red silk sashes at the waists, and blue skirts.
“Is the coffee free?” I asked.
“Yes,” all three of them said together.
I looked directly at the one with the green eyes. “Is it free?” I asked her.
“Yes, it is,” she said, and again she blushed.
“... tire size is thirty-two by three and a half. Now here’s something you may not be able to discern with the naked eye...”
“My name is Will Tyler,” I said.
“I’m Nancy Clark,” she answered.
“Nancy Ellen Clark,” one of the other girls corrected.
“She’s my sister.” Nancy said, and smiled into my eyes.
“... first car in the history of America, in fact, the history of the world, to have an all-steel body. Now let me show you the upholstery...”
I thought of nothing but Nancy Ellen Clark all that winter and through the next year. Mr. Wilson’s policy with the Germans seemed to be working, and even Bryan supported him in the election of 1916, saying, “I agree with the American people in thanking God we have a president who has kept, who will keep, us out of war.” I myself favored Hughes, but I wasn’t old enough to vote, and anyhow I was in love. The election seemed remote, the war seemed remote, only Nancy danced through my head as I felled trees in those silent woods. In December, the Germans made a peace offer to the Allies, and the war seemed all but over. Besides, like a baseball game that had run into far too many extra innings, it had lost all interest for me. Even when President Wilson disclosed his plan for aiding the belligerents in securing peace, I couldn’t have cared less. Peace would be nice, yes, I certainly wanted peace — but more than anything else in the world, I wanted Nancy Ellen Clark.
And then, I don’t know what happened — it had all seemed so close, it had all seemed within reach — I don’t know what suddenly happened to change it. The Germans weren’t interested in Wilson’s assistance, it seemed, nor were the Allies interested in Germany’s peace offer. A few weeks after my seventeenth birthday, Wilson told the Senate all about his League for Peace and while in Wisconsin we were still talking about what he’d called “peace without victory,” in Berlin the Germans announced that beginning February 1, they’d once again pursue a policy of unrestricted submarine warfare.
In the woods, the days were short, the sun glared through leafless branches, glazing the crusted snow. Word trickled back to us day by day. The wagon crew would return from Eau Fraiche to report that Wilson had severed diplomatic relations with the German Empire; Wilson would soon ask that America arm its merchant vessels; a note from a German minister named Alfred Zimmerman had been intercepted and decoded, and it proposed to give Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona to the Mexican people if they accepted alliance with Germany in a war with the United States — stories we half-believed, like the atrocity talcs back in 1914. But then the wagon came back one Friday with a story we knew was true, a story we did not want to believe because it was far worse than the sinking of the Lusitania had been: the Germans had sunk three American ships, and Wilson had asked for a special session of Congress to discuss “grave matters.”
We declared war against Germany on April 6.
I was seventeen years old and in love.
I wanted no part of it, I truly did not. And yet, less than a year later, I enlisted in the United States Army. If you’d asked me why at the time, I couldn’t have told you. Oh sure, I’d given Nancy a big patriotic recital that night of the Grange dance in January, man’s duty to his country, do my bit, make the world safe for democracy, all that, but I really hadn’t known why I was so anxious to get to where the lighting was. Now, not four months later, in the hold of a ship that would be sailing for Brest within hours, I thought I knew.
There’s a killing time.
There’s a time when you need to kill and must therefore kill.
That time had come for me early in 1918, and I had acted impulsively on the burning itch inside me, the desire to move into action, to strike, to hurt, to kill. Now, in April, the bloodlust was all but gone, and I knew only that I was leaving Nancy for God knew how long, maybe forever, and I wanted to weep.
Timothy Bear found me in the darkness and put his huge hand on my shoulder.
“How goes it, Bert?” he asked.
“Lousy,” I said.
“Ever think you’d see this day?”
“No,” I answered honestly.
There was comfort in his presence beside me in the darkness. I had known him all through sixteen miserable weeks of preliminary training, weeks of repeating the manual of arms, weeks of formation drills and setting-up exercises and recruit instruction, lectures on the care of clothing and equipment, military discipline and courtesy, orders for sentinels, personal hygiene and care of the goddamn feet, Articles of War, the obligations and rights of the soldier (all obligations, no rights!), weeks of inspections, drills, and more inspections. I had suffered with him through courses on rifle sighting, rifle nomenclature and care, rifle aiming, and trigger squeeze; I had endured first-aid drills with him, gas-warfare drills, grenade and bomb drills, waking at 5:45 each and every day of the week, eating swill my mother wouldn’t have allowed in her garbage can no less her kitchen, and tumbling exhausted into bed at ten each night, already dreading the sound of the bugle the next morning, damn Irving Berlin and his rotten song!
I think the company would have fallen apart in those sixteen weeks if it hadn’t been for Timothy Bear (his last name was really Graham, but somebody had dubbed him “The Bear” in the first few weeks of cantonment at Camp Greene, and the name had stuck). He was six feet four inches tall in his naked toenails, as wide across as any tree I’d ever felled in the woods north of Eau Fraiche, the Army uniform fitting him like a sausage skin strained to bursting across his powerful chest and shoulders. He could lift the rear end of a weapons carrier with his bare hands, unassisted, and his endurance was equally phenomenal; returning once from a twenty-mile forced march with full pack, Timothy Bear had wanted to go dancing in town. He never complained, not about anything, nor was his attitude faked — his face was as open as a child’s, his brown eyes totally guileless. He had blond hair which he’d worn straight and long back on his father’s Indiana farm, but which the Army barbers had cropped close to his head, heightening his resemblance to a big, affable grizzly. Lumbering, genial, inexhaustible, he became the kind of man and soldier we all wished we could be. He was eighteen years old.